KNX makes news with changes

To the surprise of longtime listeners across Southern
California, the venerable Los Angeles all-news station KNX is
undergoing an extreme makeover.

The background sounds of clickety-clacking teletype machines?
Gone. The nightly radio drama hour? History. Even KNX's
just-the-headlines approach to news is now a thing of the past.

The credit -- or the blame, depending on your point of view --
belongs to David Hall, vice president of programming at KNX and its
sister news station, KFWB. Since Hall arrived last fall, his
overriding goal has been to give individual personalities to the
two stations.

"They've been trying to do the same thing and beat each other up
for 35 years," he said. "I'm trying to separate them. The idea is
not to homogenize; the idea is to make the stations even more
different."

Indeed, KNX -- heard easily in North County -- and KFWB have
long been locked in a battle for listeners. The cross-town fight
even continued after they landed under the same owner,
Infinity/CBS, in the 1990s.

Under Hall, KFWB continues to provide quickie news headlines,
while KNX goes deeper with longer reports and programs devoted to
topics such as business, personal finance, technology and food.

"KNX is really focusing on … explaining things, putting things
in perspective, giving you more information about the things that
are important," Hall said.

After Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's inaugural address, for
example, KFWB focused on what he said while KNX offered perspective
by interviewing every living former governor (except Ronald Reagan,
who is suffering from Alzheimer's disease).

Not everyone is happy with the changes. Some of the specialty
shows leave something to be desired (the lactose-intolerant should
avoid the cheesy "Computer News With Jeff Levy"), and listeners
flooded the station with hundreds of complaints after Hall yanked
KNX's nightly drama hour, which featured old-time radio shows such
as "Gunsmoke" and the "Lux Radio Theater."

Despite the protests, overall ratings at KNX actually went up
since the drama hour disappeared.

"So, go figure," Hall said.

Meanwhile, KNX's ratings in San Diego remain surprisingly strong
considering that it has only one reporter based here and is largely
focused on the "Southland" to the north. According to the most
recent Arbitron ratings, KNX attracts as many listeners in the
county as talk stations KCBQ and KPRZ and sports talk station XTRA.
(It helps that KNX has a powerful 50,000-watt signal that blankets
Southern California.)

According to Hall, KNX is well aware that it has listeners in
San Diego, especially in North County.

"I realize with the signal that KNX has, it's important to reach
far beyond the metro area. There's a huge audience out there to
serve."

Time -- and the ratings -- will tell whether he's made the right
decisions about how to serve those listeners.

Country station KSON, which recently lost the morning duo of
"Tony & Kris" to archrival U.S. 95.7, has lassoed a new morning
team called "Cliff & Company." The team's leader is Cliff
Dumas, formerly of a light jazz station in Calgary, Alberta. He is
working with two other out-of-towners: Morgan Thomas (formerly of
Raleigh, N.C.) and Bill Tanner (formerly of Reno, Nev.).

Reuters news service reports that a coalition of broadcasters is
asking the Federal Communications Commission to ban satellite radio
companies from offering localized programming. Earlier this year,
XM Radio debuted several new channels offering 24-hour traffic and
weather information for cities such as Los Angeles and Boston. An
XM channel for San Diego is scheduled to appear soon.

The earth-bound broadcasters say the networks are violating
rules that prevent them from operating local programming; XM points
out that all the traffic/weather channels are offered to the entire
country, so they're not technically local. Stay tuned for more
developments on this front.

Air America, the new liberal talk-show network, went off the air
in Los Angeles and Chicago last week in a dispute over money.
According to news reports, the owner of the stations claimed that
an Air America check bounced; the network, which is renting time on
the stations, disputed the owner's claims.

After a couple of days, Al Franken & Co. returned to the
airwaves on the stations, but not before Air America posted a
vicious message on its Web site about the stations' owner, Arthur
Liu.

Among other things, the message, written in inflammatory Matt
Drudge-style, said the network got "screwed, Liu'd, and tattooed.
How Liu can you get? What we're getting at is that we hate
him."

Yikes. It's nice to see that Air America is already setting new
standards for civility in talk radio.